Capably Incapable by dina porovic

Parents often love to tell anecdotes about their children, and when you are the child in question that can often be embarrassing and occasionally enlightening. Apparently, my most used phrase as a toddler was “I will do it by myself”. Now, read into that what you will but I am afraid that I know that this phrase rings true for me as an adult as much as it did when I was a child. I hate to feel incapable, I can be terrible at asking for help and I can be quite obstinate about receiving and responding to advice. I have a sense that I should authentically own the decisions that I make and that I must be capable enough to look after myself in all situations. 

Over time of course we all learn to understand ourselves better, embrace who we are and crucially seek to grow by not only recognising the flaws in our approach but endeavouring to overcome them to become better people. 

So here is a question for you - how many of you know how to cook a simple meal entirely by yourselves (and I am not talking about reheating a pizza in the microwave)? How many of you know what to do if a light bulb in your house goes? How many of you would know what to do during a power cut? How many of you would know how to survive without electricity for several days? How many of you would know who to vote for in the next election if you were asked to? How many of you know the rules governing drivers in your countries or even how to drive a car?

Now, if I kept going my questions could become more and more abstract and removed from the reality that you are living today here at school in our little bubble where we have access to electricity, WiFI, central heating, fresh food, clean water, security, reliable transportation etc. 

But in a world not far beyond the one we know there are situations where these “basics” do not hold true and where we can start to feel very vulnerable incredibly quickly. 

I have no shame in admitting to you that I think that I would not last more than a couple of days lost in a jungle or on a desert island. I feel incredibly badly equipped to look after myself in terms of keeping myself warm, determining what is edible, building a suitable shelter and identifying and protecting myself from poisonous and lethal creatures. You might think that this might make me rush out to sign up to a course on bushcraft and survival in the wild. But here I am, 20 something years on from this terrifying realisation and I have yet to do anything about it. 

Survival in the wild… overrated?

And you know why?

Because I have weighed up my risks and decided that the likelihood of me needing to know these skills is not very high. I am not planning a trip to the jungle and it is not somewhere where I might end up accidentally. So I have not made it a priority. Some of you will consider this to be incredibly lazy of me, some of you might consider it to be pragmatic.

But here is the thing, how many of you have deprioritised getting involved with or learning about certain things, because you don’t believe them to be that important or relevant to you? And with what level of confidence have you made those decisions? Parents will cook the dinner, change the lightbulb etc. Someone else will tell me what to do if there is a powercut. I will be able to find out information about who to vote for when my moment to vote comes. Driving can’t be that difficult, and anyway, I am legally not allowed to learn it yet.

Some might call this “cognitive offloading”. The idea that we do not spend intellectual time or energy on things that someone or something else can do, leaving our minds free to engage better with the things that we are interested in or do need to focus on in the immediate future.

And guess what, AI is offering up such a wealth of things that we can cognitively offload. In fact, in some cases it is so powerful (and increasingly more so) that not only is it better for us to offload menial and uninteresting tasks, but in some areas of science, medicine, logistics, it would appear to be a more efficient option that can reap huge benefits for humanity

The AI revolution is here…

So win, win?

Personally, I have never been too concerned about AI taking over the world and am fairly reassured by the fact that any AI is only as good as its trainer and relies on generating ideas and answering questions, based on the information it has been “fed”. We are not talking about sentient beings with a lust for power. Those are humans!

However, I am exceptionally worried about what we are about to give up as we give ourselves over to the convenience of AI. It is so much easier to type virtually any questions into ChatGPT and get a comprehensive, balanced, researched response than to go and do the research ourselves. Why bother reading books that AI has already read and can recall every word? Why search for facts and data from numerous sources when AI can bring to your fingertips the data that is most commonly quoted? Why bother reading a classic when the AI can summarise the key events, and tell you how it makes others feel? Why bother visiting a place when very soon we will probably be able to experience most of its best features through the combination of AI and VR? Why bother reading party manifestos ahead of elections when AI will be able to tell you who to vote for based on your opinions? Why bother learning about historical events, when anything that has ever happened can be recalled through AI - down to recent immersive videos documenting key historical events? Why bother learning science when machines can think faster than us already in using current facts to come up with new discoveries without breaking a sweat?

The answer - 

because it matters on a personal and societal level who owns our collective knowledge. It matters that your experiences and your feelings are authentically yours. It matters that your children and grandchildren hear the stories of your youth from you. It matters that the decisions you make and the opinions you have are as much as possible generated from your own varied experiences, from hearing the voices of different people, from engaging with different perspectives through both empathy and argument. It matters that you can write, draw, sing, create from your own heart. 

It matters, more than ever, that we can, if we wanted to, “do it by ourselves”.

If we don’t remember it, did it happen?